A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
If you are looking for the worst advice on which to build your company culture, be sure to add this piece of un-wisdom from Ashok Kushwaha (whoever that may be).
“I am responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.”
The first half of the sentence is true, you are responsible for what you say, as well as the way you say it.
It’s the second half that will royally screw you up and contribute to your company’s destruction.
It is your responsibility to be sure you are understood, whether it’s working with your team or explaining your vision and market to investors.
And it’s not just when you’re the boss.
The same holds true as a friend, volunteer, parent or the grown child to your parents.
In fact, the second part relegates the whole to one of the stupidest sentences I’ve heard/read in my lifetime.
However, it does fit the current attitude that eschews personal responsibility and believes that any word/action/behavior is justified/excused as long as there’s a reason.
That said, the possibility of success should be reason enough to make sure that whoever your audience is has a clear understanding of what you mean, since not understanding provides a clear path to failure.
“Across all our studies, the results suggest that experts take high performance as evidence of high ability and do not sufficiently discount it by the ease with which that performance was achieved,” the paper reports.
Passion can take your company a long way, but if it isn’t backed up by good hiring you’ll be in big trouble, because the wrong hire can quickly derail success.
This isn’t new info, nor is it rocket science; people do not perform in a vacuum and common sense should tell you that environment and colleagues are an integral part of any individual success—but it doesn’t.
… not only were the studies’ subjects [business executives and admissions officers] unable to counteract this correspondence bias, they remained susceptible to it even when warned explicitly of its dangers. (…) …seasoned professionals discount information about the candidate’s situation, attributing behavior to innate ability.
The outcome is one of which you should be hyper aware.
“One of the consequences is that you end up admitting people who should not be admitted, and rejecting people who should not be rejected.”
It takes hard work to beat an innate prejudice, but it can be done
In a world that constantly chatters about the importance of authenticity what’s a good recipe for staying authentic and enjoying a high level of creative freedom while making a giant difference by shaking up the establishment and still be able to pay the bills?
Ingredients
A group comedic actors, scriptwriters and directors in their 20s to late 30s
Add a wicked, satirical edge.
Mix well.
Post on your own YouTube channel.
Watch the money and changes roll in, although the money comes faster.
(Be sure to turn on Closed Captioning if you aren’t fully bilingual in Spanish.)
Any question why more than five million people have watched this?
According to Daniel Isenberg, “entrepreneurs are contrarian value creators. They see economic value where others see heaps of nothing. And they see business opportunities where others see only dead ends.”
But Isenberg also believes (along with many others) that “the main motivator for entrepreneurs is the chance of making big money.”
Richard Branson believes, “If you get into entrepreneurship driven by profit, you are a lot more likely to fail. The entrepreneurs who succeed usually want to make a difference to people’s lives, not just their own bank balances. The desire to change things for the better is the motivation for taking risks and pursuing seemingly impossible business ideas.”
Branson has a great belief that Profit and social good are not an oxymoron or mutually exclusive.
In Screw Business As Usual Branson says that from the very start his entrepreneurial drive wasn’t for money, but to have the wherewithal to fund his charitable efforts.
And over the years he’s done exactly that by funneling much of his wealth into Virgin Unite and through Virgin Unite to many entrepreneurs in the developing world and beyond, as well as creating and funding The B Team: “Our mission is to deliver a Plan B that puts people and planet alongside profit.”
Going viral is every marketer’s goal, especially entrepreneurs with a new product/service/experience that needs to rise above the noise in order to be noticed.
Going viral requires some luck, as do most successes, even if it’s the serendipitous kind (right time/right place), but it’s mostly method, as discussed previously.
Research by Thales S. Teixeira, an assistant professor in marketing at HBS, identified “four key steps: attracting viewers’ attention, retaining that attention, getting viewers to share the ad with others, and persuading viewers.”
“The challenge lies in getting the best mix of all four ingredients and baking them into your ad.”
Read the article if you’re planning any kind of video/social media campaign; Teixeira’s insights and explanations will give you a much better shot at that success.
One of the problems is that entrepreneurs are so enamored with their products that they want to tell the world about it, so the world will love it, too.
But in a time of instant information availability and short attention spans, the world doesn’t care much about your product—it wants first and foremost to be entertained.
The research shows that if sharing an ad will somehow benefit the sender as much as it helps the advertiser, then the ad might go viral.
Things that tickle your funny-bone or touch your heart are always shared faster and longer than product facts.
When an entrepreneur spent millions on his wedding during the original dot com boom a very cynical friend of mine commented, “If the wedding costs that much what do you think the divorce will cost?”
Those of you who think it’s no big deal to indulge yourself after striking it rich might want to consider the case of Halsey Minor, founder of CNET.
Minor was 38 when he started CNET and sold it to CBS for $1.8 billion when he was 42.
But that wasn’t all.
He then started and sold two more companies, Vignette Software and Snap/NBCi, and was a major investor and one of the largest shareholders in salesforce.com.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Jody Foster is chair of the department of psychiatry at Pennsylvania Hospital; immediately after receiving her MBA she has a very different experience assessing startup teams for VCs considering investing.
…to understand who the main players in that company were, how the team functioned together, what kinds of personalities they had, and which ones needed watching as the company, and the venture capitalists’ investment, grew.
I’ve said for years that people aren’t faucets and can’t/don’t turn their feelings and attitudes on and off depending where they are; Foster puts it differently.
“People are people, no matter what industry they are in, and they bring their basic personalities to work,” says Foster. “When they act out in inappropriate ways — by, for example, bullying employees who work under them, compulsively micro managing, displaying narcissistic tendencies — it can be devastating to the entire workplace.”
Founders need to evaluate potential new hires as objectively as Foster would.
That means ignoring their skills and looking at the whole person warts and all.
Your team can survive a person with great attitude, but weaker skills, until they strengthen and grow.
What your team won’t survive is the so-called star with superb skills who brings with them the traits Foster mentions or any that are in direct opposition to the culture you are creating.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
These days any talk about luck is considered heresy.
But there is such a thing.
Malcolm Gladwell understands the role luck plays and explains it in Outliers: The Story of Success.
A woman I know said, “You can be the best parent in the world, but raising great kids still requires a good dose of luck.”
Nolan Bushnell once said, “Don’t mistake good luck for good management.”
It’s luck when you bump into an investor having coffee with both the time and the inclination to listen; it’s hard work and being prepared that doesn’t waste the opportunity.
When managing people, process or circumstances, you can’t count on luck, but you also can’t ignore it.
I am republishing this post, because it speaks to the recent questions of several entrepreneurs.
The problem is that entrepreneurs often read something like this and discard it as applying to larger companies or those further along in life or revenues.
They are wrong.
Sure, the information might not fit like a glove, but it can be tweaked; and the underlying philosophy fits any enterprise, large, small or micro.
Accounting Tools a Part of Corporate Culture
Gavin Cassar, a Wharton accounting professor, tested the prevailing wisdom of whether accounting techniques, such as budgeting, sales projections and financial reporting, would, in fact, help prevent business failures. In surprising results, he found that some accounting tools may actually lead them astray.
I sent the article to a long-time CEO who was s serial entrepreneur (now retired) and thought you would find his comments interesting and useful. I’ve changed names to keep the examples he mentions anonymous, but note that Corp A was part of a Fortune 500 company and Corp B was public with sales of several hundred million and a CEO who had been around the block numerous times.
There’s only one important accounting problem described in this article.
The other problems discussed are really problems in human psychology, such as being guided by hopes instead of realistic considerations and ignoring (widening) gaps between plans and results.
But the serious accounting problem described is the failure to collect and publish accurate and timely accounting information.
If you have a carefully worked out budget, unless the monthly accounting figures are available quickly and are correct, the budget is useless as a planning tool because it’s impossible to really judge whether the company is on plan or not.
To some extent, both Corp A and Corp B suffered from this.
Accounting was not held to high enough standards. Expenses were misclassified and weren’t posted in the months in which they were actually incurred.
Managers initially tried to sit down with accounting and straighten out the discrepancies. But it was impossible, either because of poor accounting tools or probably just gross incompetence.
After a time, managers stopped trying to correct the internal financial reports. They thought it was just wasting their time.
They also stopped trying to control their expenses. Why bother? The financial reports were so inaccurate they didn’t show up even large and willful expenses outside budget limits.
This, of course, led to increasing attempts by higher management to exert personal control over expenses.
At one point, the Corp B CEO was signing all expense reports. You had to receive his personal permission to go on a trip or to even take a client to lunch.
The budget meant nothing. And there was a line of managers outside his office asking permission to buy essential test equipment or fly an applicant in for an interview.
Stuff that should have been decided instantly by the managers concerned was delayed, frustrated and often cancelled altogether.
The Corp B example is very close to what is going on with one of the entrepreneurs mentioned at the beginning.
He is micromanaging every dime spent in his fast-growing startup.
So far, his impulse to exert control has cost his company two excellent recruits and two of his senior staff are in revolt.
He needs to let go, trust his people and give them the authority to do their job.
If he doesn’t there probably won’t be a company for him to micromanage.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
If you are looking for the worst advice on which to build your company culture, be sure to add this piece of un-wisdom from Ashok Kushwaha (whoever that may be).
When an entrepreneur spent millions on his wedding during the original dot com boom a very cynical friend of mine commented, “If the wedding costs that much what do you think the divorce will cost?”
I am republishing this post, because it speaks to the recent questions of several entrepreneurs.
